1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present disclosure relate to controlling downloading web pages, and more particularly to a system and method for controlling downloading web pages.
2. Description of Related Art
Commonly, information may be made available in a computer network such as the Internet or intranets in the form of web pages. It is usual for users to use a search engine to find particular pages according to user defined parameters in the form of a search phrase. One example is when a user enters a search phrase and activates a search using a search engine on a web portal to display a list of search results. These search result pages are usually organized in a predictable way. Main search results may be listed in the form of links along with a brief description and/or excerpt of the page pointed to by each link. Additionally there may be many other links on the page that point to other services of the portal or websites of paid advertisers etc. At times a user may wish to download many of the pages to a local server, or a PC for browsing offline. To check each page pointed to by the links and decide if it is desirable to download it is time-consuming and inconvenient. So a user may decide to use a program which can download all the pages pointed to by all the links on the search results page and store them in their computer or server for offline viewing.
However, such programs do not differentiate between the links for the main search results and the other links. Additionally, the search results may be too numerous to list on one page so there may be many search result pages for one search. Unfortunately, many of the links may in fact point to the same page resulting in duplicate downloads and many of the links may point to old pages that are not relevant to the current search when someone is looking for fresh information.
Therefore, what is needed is a system and method for downloading only those web pages pointed to by links on a particular webpage according to user defined parameters.